IMMUNOLOGY PIONEER NIELS K. JERNE, 82

Niels K. Jerne, a London-born immunologist and co-recipient of the 1984 Nobel Prize for medicine, died Friday at his home in Pont du Gard in southern France. He was 82.

He had been suffering from cancer of the throat for about a year, said a cousin, Campbell Moses of New York.

Mr. Jerne-pronounced YER-nee-was director of the Basel Institute of Immunology, in Switzerland, for 11 years, until 1980. He then taught and lectured in Paris and elsewhere before retiring a decade ago.

Arthur Silverstein, a professor at Johns Hopkins University's medical school, wrote in his book "A History of Immunology" that Mr. Jerne's contributions to immunology were "almost too numerous to record," and his "theoretical contributions helped to bring immunology and immunologists to their current important position in the biomedical sciences."

The 1984 prize went to Mr. Jerne, who had dual Danish and British citizenship, and to two other researchers for their research on the human immune system.

He was designated a co-winner in recognition of the role that his pioneering theories had in spurring research in immunology.

Mr. Jerne's co-recipients were Cesar Milstein of the British Medical Research Council's laboratory in Cambridge, England, and Georges J. F. Kohler of the Basel Institute of Immunology.

The announcement of the prize, from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, described Mr. Jerne as "the leading theoretician in immunology during the last 30 years."

Before he became director of the Basel Institute, in whose founding he had been instrumental, Mr. Jerne was the chief medical officer for immunology with the World Health Organization in Geneva from 1956 to 1962.